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I agree with this, and with Nassim Taleb's point. Having worked in the medical domain in the past, paramedics and medics that should know better were taking ex
by jll29 3y ago
I agree with this, and with Nassim Taleb's point.
Having worked in the medical domain in the past, paramedics and medics that should know better were taking extremely high health-related risks (riding a motor bike => crashing and burning to death, smoking => dying from lung canceer, speeding onto a crossing => dying in an ambulance crash before arriving at the 999 call site etc.).
So risk is indeed its own discipline, separate from the domain where risk applies, even if we are talking about the life-rescuing domain of medicine: a person rescuing another is not automatically an expert at reducing their own (health/life) risk exposure.
While neural network research results are published in NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ECML/PKDD, JMLR etc., risk results tend to get published in the risk community at conferences like SRA [1] (Europe: SRA-E) and the likes. I'm not a fan of this academic segregation, merely describing what is going on (in my own teaching, for instance, I include risk/ethics consideration along the way with teaching the technical side, to avoid ignorance caused by over-compartmentalization).
[1] Annual Meeting of the Society of Risk Analysis, https://www.sra.org/events-webinars/annual-meeting/ https://www.sra.org/events-webinars/annual-meeting/
- petermcneeley 3y agoBut then how does that jive with skin in the game? In his Nassim's teaching he brings up the example of the idea that the Roman engineers that built/designed the bridges were forced to have their families live under the bridges. It sounds like those engineers directly involved in the practice do understand the risk of their domains it is merely their incentives that need to be aligned.
- dist-epoch 3y ago> But then how does that jive with skin in the game Simple. Nassim says there are 4 quadrants, one axis Mediocristan-Extremistan, the other Simple-Complex payoff. Building a bridge is Mediocristan/Simple payoff, a well understood problem with no black swans. So it's easy to compute risk. Other stuff is Extremistan/Complex payoff - financial trading, pandemics, AI. And he argues that you need RISK professionals for this quadrant, because people working here (traders, virologists, AI builders) do not understand how to compute the risk correctly. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gaute-Bjorklund-Wangen/publication/318853336/figure/fig4/AS:931308163301378@1599052577229/Talebs-four-quadrants-for-Risk-Classification-Based-on-Taleb143.ppm https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gaute-Bjorklund-Wangen/...
- petermcneeley 3y agoYou think the virologists do not understand the risks? And what are the biases of the risk professionals? What are their motives?